Radioamateur Competition Announcement

D-Star ONE launch is coming – in three days the first private German CubeSat, designed and built by German Orbital Systems will be delivered to orbit by Soyuz launch vehicle from Vostochny launch site. That’s why today we announce a competition dedicated to this event for all the radio amateurs worldwide. The winner will be awarded a unique gift package from German Orbital Systems which will be shipped worldwide, as well as a personal D-Star beacon message which will be recorded and aired after the commissioning phase is completed.

Among other things, the gift package will include real parts of the qualification model of D-Star ONE, a bottle of a local spirit as well as a personal certificate for the winner.

All you have to do, to win the price is:

The name and callsign of the winner will be published on our website as well as on Twitter and Facebook.

The final tests of the D-Star One small satellite

To be able to receive our beacon, you will need some additional information on the launch and on the satellite itself, which is summed up below.

As all of you know, D-Star ONE is scheduled for launch for November 28 from Vostochny launch site in eastern Russia. The time of nominal liftoff of the launch vehicle will be at 2:42 p.m. local time (GMT/UTC + 09:00 hour).

For those who are interested, we will publish links to a video translation of the launch on our social media accounts as soon as we get them.

Once the vehicle is in orbit and the main payload has been separated, all secondary payloads will be separated one by one. This sequence is driven by the DCSM unit designed and built by German Orbital Systems. D-Star ONE will be separated 9510 seconds after liftoff.

D-Star ONE has two parallel deployment switches, which will be activated after separation. The separation event starts an internal timer which gives the signal for antenna deployment 30 minutes later. Once the antennas are deployed, the system changes to LEOP mode and begins to transmit beacon-signal. The transmission frequency of the module with the voice beacon is 435.525 MHz. Of course, you will have to take into account the Doppler shift.

The preliminary TLEs of D-Star One after separation can be downloaded here. We used 99999 instead name and left the launch site name and launch number blank.

We have calculated the TLEs from the information which was made available to us by the Russian authorities. They might deviate a little until precise info comes from NORAD, so keep trying.